We developed a custom WordPress site for a client and now they want to get started on writing some blog posts. We always encourage blog posts, whether we write them for you or you write them yourself or even both. Content is King and blog posts are a great way to not only get “keyword juice” on your site, but the posts should educate your potential clients with information relative to your industry that they will find useful and want to come back to you as the subject matter expert.
Blog Guidelines
Here are some basic guidelines. Remember, blog reading is different from regular reading:
- Make sure it is information or educational and not salesy.
- Focus on 1 or 2 keyword phrases (blog writing guidelines or blog formatting) and use that actual wording at least 2 times in the article.
- Come up with an enticing (kick ass is the industry term) heading or title for your article as well as subheadings for sections in the article. Your headline describes your topic and includes your focus keyword phrases for search engine optimization (SEO). Heading tags (H1 and H2) should be used in the code because google focuses on them when its crawling the page.
- Put at least 1 image/picture in the article, graphs are really good too. These are ways to draw attention. istockphoto.com is good stock photo site.
- Don’t write long paragraphs of information, users don’t have the patience to read. Break it up into short paragraphs and use bulleted lists and bold some text that you want to stand out
- Leverage Text Call-Outs
- Highlighting the purpose of your blog posts or particularly important points in text call-out boxes adds some serious emphasis to your statement:
- Have an introduction, the body of the article and then a conclusion that wraps up the discussion.
- You can pose the introduction as a question like- How Do We Solve the Problems of …..?
- Then explain the problem in further detail and outline how you solve the problem (here you can have a download available)
- Your conclusion is where you’ll paraphrase the key takeaway you outlined earlier and/or prompt your reader with a question.
- Link to additional resources within the post
